and yet…

…more reasons to get along with my ex.

“Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.”  from today’s NYTimes, Fathers Gain Respect from Experts (and Mothers)

wordless

Life has me in her grip. So much going on as I feel my small boat rocked on the ocean. Confident that I’ll get to shore, but like  Max, not sure where I’ll end up. So today, pictures only. Beautiful images to get us all through.

 

 

 

I believe in the possibility of everything…

I do. Yes, me. Pragmatic me.

Tonight is a reading by my friend Hope Edelman from her new memoir, The Possibility of Everything. In the book, she and her husband take their daughter to Belize where Maya is treated by shaman healers. It’s an adventure tale, for sure, but more so the book is about faith. It’s an exploration of what we can allow ourselves to trust. Where and when can we let go, even a little bit, and let powers beyond ourselves support us?

“Trust the Universe,” is a phrase that annoys me. (And Hope, it seems from her book, agrees – or agreed.) I take this phrase as be code for “give up trying.” And I’m all about trying. I work really really really hard to keep everything going. Too hard, some would say. But if I stop, then what would happen? It would be as though The Universe (ah, yeah, that again!) would see me not working hard enough and any little bit of goodness it was thinking of sending my way would evaporate. This is my fear: stop and all will collapse. Keep going, and I’ll eventually be rewarded.

After this January, I have no idea where I’m earning my income. The temporary job I have ends then. The local job market is as dry as it is everywhere else, and relatively small as my town is only 60,000 souls. So the reality of poverty – along with my anger over the child support pittance – can wake me up at night. This giant worry I’ll call Financial Woe, comes and sits on the side of my bed and hisses fear in my ears. Many nights, she is there, coiling her long legs around mine and not letting me come up for air. “It’s all going to collapse,” she snarls. “The worst is going to happen.” She is sure. And by 4:30 am, I am sure, too. What “the worst” is, I don’t exactly know. It’s a feeling. A color. A shape. Nothing concrete. Just utter fear and failure.

But then, as if by magic, there are days like yesterday when I’m sure it’s all going to work out. Some time in early January, just in the nick of time –  maybe even in early February – something will appear in my lap – some job or project. It may be just enough, or it may be bigger and better than anything I can imagine right now. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it will appear. And that experience – just like so many others like it I’ve had over the years – will help me to extend my belief in the possibility of everything. Again. Little by little, step by step, this Pragmatist has been becoming a believer. Walking just like Indiana Jones across the invisible divide. Getting up every morning, knowing even on my darkest days, that somewhere, somehow, it will work out. That hissing lady is still there, and it may take years longer for me to totally rid her from my life; but in the meantime, I’m doing better at floating – laying my head back and knowing that the water will hold me.

 

 

 

it doesn’t add up

Can anyone explain the math involved in child support payments? How is it that a father can be told by the state to pay $225 a month for two kids when the mother  makes less than he does and has the children 5 nights/week, and also pays for 90% of their food, 75% of their clothing, all of their incidentals (e.g., toothpaste, birthday gifts, violin rental, laundry detergent) and does 95% of the work involved in keeping them going, e.g.,  appearing civilized and moderately groomed, getting their homework done, arriving in the right place at somewhat the right time. It seems to me that the courts ASSUME that somehow the mother will come up with the rest of the money that the $225 does not cover in monthly expenses — whether it means borrowing or working crap jobs that take her away from her kids or renting out more and more of her house. How this adds up to make any kind of sense whatsoever is beyond me.

Two years. Really?

Elizabeth sent me this link to a funny essay by divorce memoirist Suzanne Finnamore about how it takes two years to get over your divorce. I’ve got admit that while this sounds like good advice, it just doesn’t jibe for me.

Finnamore writes:  I got through the First Christmas. The First Valentine’s Day. The First Wedding Anniversary. The First Divorce Anniversary. It slowly eased up; the psychic damage was beginning, if not to disappear, then to taper. I stopped wishing him dead, and started wishing him rich so he could send us more money. This did not happen.

As I wrote in a note to a comment a few weeks ago, I think we’re all on our own schedules. Some of us have been consciously mourning our marriages for quite awhile – letting go in stages – accept various “deaths.”  I know Alex and the kids and I will have Christmas together for years to come. I’ve never cared about Valentine’s Day. And our wedding anniversary hasn’t had any resonance for me since the one four years ago when I figured out he’d had an affair. (Yes, on our anniversary, after weeks of asking him to tell me the truth, I discovered a smoking gun email that made it quite clear he’d a) had an affair, and b) lied to me about it. Gosh, Happy Anniversary!)

I remember when my dad died from cancer and I didn’t have the immediate grief response I thought I should have. But then I realized that in so many ways I’d been grieving and letting go for the year of his illness. I’d already done quite a bit of the work. Not that I was “all better” or ready to get on with things as though nothing had happened. Not at all. But I’d already moved beyond a certain point of raw grief. And I think the same is very much true of where I am with the end of my marriage to Alex.

This weekend I watched Away We Go, a very sweet film about a young couple who are trying to figure out where to live and how to be as they prepare to become parents. There’s a part where a song is playing that says, “Promise you’ll always wait for me.” The context of the song within the movie makes it clear that this means:  when I fuck up, when I’m slow to learn — wait for me. Promise.  And this — much more than any holiday — really got to me. Because I feel that Alex and I grew at different paces. We took different paths at some point. And maybe I didn’t wait for him long enough? He didn’t ask me to wait – but maybe part of the deal you make when you get married is that the other person shouldn’t have to ask, might not even know at certain points in his/her life that they need to ask — but you wait anyway. And I didn’t.  This is the question I’ll come back to for years.

confused or just highly curious?

Wondering what it means that on my Mondo Beyondo list I had these two side-by-side entries:  #24)  Live in France.  #25) Learn Spanish.

not as I’d intended

Sylvia Plath and her children.

In the midst of holding my daughter while she howled over having bitten the inside of her lip, as the 92-year old dog (in dog years) tripped yet again and fell to the ground, as Thomas screamed that he couldn’t have desert because he’d already been given two sugar cookies (before dinner and without my permission) at soccer, as no freelance work appears on the horizon and no new metier makes itself clear, as the bills overflow on my so-called and poorly named “communications table” … I wonder if I’m really going to be able to do this on my own. This is not what God intended – and I don’t even believe in God. But who/whatever created this great soup of life surely did not intend for one woman to care for two kids on her own while trying to make a living. It just doesn’t add up.

When I was pregnant with both kids and living in a different house — a very narrow, old farmhouse with a single toilet downstairs — I’d invariably have to go to the bathroom at 2 a.m. on frigid nights. All the way down, gripping the banister that a thoughtful friend had installed, I’d repeat mantra-like: “At least I have a bathroom. At least I have a bathroom.” It got me through many nocturnal pees with my grace intact and without rancor. I’m looking now for my mantra.

into the woods

I’m afraid but not even sure what of. It’s a big amorphous feeling. A force. The fear has been in my dreams:  In one, I was working at a bank in a non-descript white room at a desk that I’d had since childhood. I went out for a break and came back to find the desk gone – as was my job. Just like that. Gone. This is a fear tied to the local university’s announcement of a job freeze and to the news of Gourmet’s shuttering, a story that feels like a bell weather to me. In the next dream, I was suiting up to go downhill skiiing. I’ve never been downhill skiiing and am very afraid of heights. There was to be no instruction. They were just dropping me on the mountain – by helicopter – and leaving me there. Last night’s dreams were a bit gentler, but only just. I had 24-hours to outfit an empty house with appliances and furniture without any money — I had to do it by luck and charm — or I’d lose it. By the time I’d awakened, I’d managed to have a Viking stove come into my possession and the memory of Sylvia Plath had fleetingly occurred to me.

I made it a goal when Alex and I separated to eschew fear, to kick it out of my orbit and never to embrace it again. Fear has been such a constant bedfellow to me for years, prohibiting me from becoming my best self. And yet here it is. This gaseous dance of colors and sounds, a force field.

Last night in a scorching hot bath, I picked up Eat, Pray Love and opened it to a random section. Gilbert was remembering a trip she’d taken to a remote Balinese island a few years earlier – before deciding to leave her husband and light off around the globe. She’d sat on the beach and recognized each fear, each sorrow, each anger, and each shame from her life. (How she’d magically remembered them all, she doesn’t say — I have a habit of draping such memories in blackness so that they become hard to find later.) She acknowledged each one and then let it go. When she was finished, she felt cleansed and empty – void of the gaseous dance. But she knew that new shames and fears and angers would take their places. Again and again she would do this dance until she came to the point of, well, enlightenment. Until then, each of stays in the dance. All we can try for is a bit more grace.

So here I go: out into the world. Ready to dance with my fears. With that disappearing desk and the giant stove, with the mountain of sheer ice.

of two minds

Alex is down. He is thinking of moving away. Not far. But away. To a place where he has more friends. It’s a  move that on some levels makes sense and seems inevitable – more work possibilities which means more money for me – something that is definitely of interest as I’m currently receiving none. But it’s also away from the kids. A move that would be more than a large splinter in their hearts. A move that would speak volumes to them about love and trust.

And so here’s where I’m of two minds:  do I let him stew in his own juices – leave him alone to his own depression and whatever its outcome may be? or do I  try to be helpful in the name of my kids and provide avenues for him to feel more connected to this community, give him ideas for how to establish roots here that will help him feel less isolated and make him want to stay? In short, do I become my children’s advocate, even if that means being in a relationship with my ex that isn’t  entirely comfortable and is more than bit galling, or do I say fuck it? I think I already know the answer. But I’m not sure I like it.

for each of you

Shine on, people!

“He was also a great kisser.”

I have Greg Brown’s song “Rexroth’s Daughter” in my head today. It’s been one of my favorite songs for years now – a real touchstone. So many parts of this song get under my skin, but today I’m ruminating on the third stanza:  “…even the very longest love does not last too long / she’d stand there in my doorway smoothing out her dress / & say ‘this life is a thump-ripe melon–so sweet and such a mess.’”

So sweet. Indeed, so messy. And all too short.

Today, these lines are there for Elizabeth and Scott. Scott died on Sunday, at home with Elizabeth and their two daughters. They were the real deal:  the loves of each other’s lives. The obituary Elizabeth wrote says it all — a life of shared passions (books), of children and friends and family, of journeys, and baking and beer making, and kissing. “He was also a great kisser,” ends the obituary. May we all be so lucky to have someone who remains so dedicated and smitten that he or she writes this final line for us. Amen.

Into the great good night – Scott. Into the dawn with your eyes open and your heart held by many – Elizabeth. With love and dignity and honor to the love you created and held for so many years.

Rexroth’s Daughter

by Greg Brown

Coldest night of the winter working up my farewell
in the middle of everything under no particular spell
i am dreaming of the mountains where the children learn the stars
clouds roll in from nebraska dark chords on a big guitar
my restlessness is long gone i would stand here like an old jack pine
but I’m looking for rexroth’s daughter the friend of a friend of mine

i can’t believe your hands and mouth did all that to me
are so daily naked for all the world to see
that thunderstorm in michigan i never will forget
we shook right with the thunder & with the pounding rain got wet
where did you turn when you turned from me with your arms across your chest
i am looking for rexroth’s daughter i saw her in the great northwest

would she have said it was the wrong time if I had found her then
i don’t want too much a field across the road and a few good friends
she used to come & see me but she was always there & gone
even the very longest love does not last too long
she’d stand there in my doorway smoothing out her dress
& say “this life is a thump-ripe melon–so sweet and such a mess”

i wanted to get to know you but you said you were shy
i would have followed you anywhere but hello rolled into goodbye
i just stood there watching as you walked along the fence
beware of them that look at you as an experience
you’re back out on the highway with your poems of city heat
& I’m looking for rexroth’s daughter here on my own side street

the murderer who lived next door seemed like such a normal guy–
if you try to follow what they shove at us you run out of tears to cry
i heard a man speak quietly i listened for a while
he spoke from his heart to my woe & then he bowed & smiled
what is real but compassion as we move from birth to death
i am looking for rexroth’s daughter & I’m running out of breath

spring will come back i know it will & it will do its best
so useful so endangered like a lion or a breast
i think about my children when i look at any child’s face
& pray that we will find a way to get with all this amazing grace
it’s so cold out there tonight so stormy i can hardly see
& i’m looking for rexroth’s daughter & i guess i always will be

take care

Found my wedding album the other night and looked through it. I so don’t look like me in the pictures. Alex looks essentially the same to me — handsome, a twinkle in his eye, relatively relaxed in the world. I look like a very uptight, nervous, somewhat overweight person who is not comfortable in her own skin. I don’t look fun – at all. Nor do I particularly look in love. Unless nervous counts as in love.

I re-read my dad’s comments that he made as part of the ceremony and they are, uhmm, polite. They are warm, certainly, and wish us well. But if you dig, they don’t register confidence. He married my mom when she was 19 and pregnant with me, so it’s not like he was the expert of Perfect Unions. And my parents were certainly friends first and foremost – not dreamy lovers. He sensed already, though, that Alex wasn’t going to be a good caretaker. He knew – I hope – that I was tough enough to take care of myself, but you always want your kids to be with someone who will hold up his or her half — or more. I think about how much I needed holding up then–emotionally fragile as I was. The fact that Alex hadn’t run screaming from the room as I dealt with depression and a sexual abuse memory translated to “caretaking for me.” But now I see that not running away and care taking are not the same thing.

I have this legacy of being afraid of being taken care of, of leaning on someone else too much. When C. says he adores me, I shrink and shirk. And yet, really, when have I ever been taken care of in a really essential and loving way. When have I been adored and respected, my needs listened to without the other person either running or trying to fix me in ways that I didn’t need or want to be fixed? Care taking is essentially about listening, about being present. It’s about bringing doughnuts in the morning and cleaning up the kitchen. But sometimes it’s also someone meeting you in the mid-afternoon when her heart is broken and sitting as a witness as she spills all of her beans. I am, it appears, being taken care of and wow, is it scary. And enormous in possibility.

**It’s been suggested that taking care of isn’t the right term. Nurtured, being seen, being present with … these are perhaps better options. And ya know what? I’m down with that.

…this is grace

Here I am at the cusp of a new relationship with C. (yes, blog, meet C.). So much possibility. Am I being a clear-eyed, smart me? I wonder… Or am I allowing myself to get lost in narratives? I feel more me than ever before. I feel present. I feel ready. I feel so at home in my journey and as though I’ve felt another traveler who won’t impede me but will rather carry my load from time to time, and me his. This is grace.

I am thinking tonight, too, of two friends, both named Elizabeth, both met via the Internet. One is sitting tonight with her darling Scott in Indiana, the love of her life, the father of her two girls. A fellow librarian. He’s being knocked down – taken out – by cancer.  Horrid, wretched cancer. To lose your mate, your best friend at 40-odd years … well, it’s too soon. So hard. And yet I’m happy for them in a way. They aren’t being “brave” per se, but are rather facing it head on. Living it. Being present with Scott’s dying. They are inside the process in a way that is incredibly powerful. Elizabeth and her daughters — and, who knows, maybe Scott, too — won’t come out the other side as the same people. It’s powerful, powerful work.

And there’s Elizabeth another state over. Sitting with a sealed envelope of things she would like to find in a partner. A list she wrote a year ago. A list she was led to after her marriage ended. A list she can’t quite remember but feels ready – I believe – to reconsider. This Elizabeth, too, is on a powerful journey. And she is so present with herself and her sons, and even her ex. Present with his lies. Present with his Buddha-nature potential that she sees but that alludes him. Present with her own slow but searching and whip-smart self.

What a time for journeys. May we all open ourselves to the heavens and our great good. There is so much out there to be discovered.

Calgon, take me away!

Two sick kids with temperatures. Both of them missing birthday parties and  miserable. Paying bills and watching my checking account whither. The good thing I came across while opening dreaded envelopes?  The “you’ve been approved for free lunches” letter from the school district due to your abject poverty. Oh, great. Now my kids can eat garbage – for free! Applying for jobs I don’t really want. Grocery shopping and trying to decide between pesticide-filled this and insecticide-covered that and high-fructose this. Feeling pudgy and pokey. …. Calgon, take me away!

flying

It didn’t occur to me that I might be the one to move on and Alex would be standing in the same place. Since I’ve felt that I’ve moved beyond the relationship and that was a major reason for the divorce, this is utterly nonsensical, but a lifelong fear of abandonment kept me thinking that he would meet someone, move (literally), and fly off in a new place/space. That I would be here in my same house with our kids as mainly my kids, and just trying to make ends meet. I am in the same house. My kids are often mainly my kids. And I’m definitely just barely making ends meet (there but by the grace of my mother’s generosity go I). And yet … I am moving on. Flying off in a new place/space. Of all of the post-divorce narratives I wrote for myself, I did not foresee this one.

cliff dweller

I keep having an image of me hanging off a cliff. I have a rope and those special spidey power shoes, so I’m safeish, but I’m really not used to hanging off a cliff. I’ve gotten better at it over the past year, and even found some smallish comfort zone, but it’s just not my natural space. I’m gwetting tired and, frankly, bored. But the top of the cliff is just right there – ugh, canalmostreach it. Almost it.

Breathe. Keep hanging. The rope’s got you. Now, before you can stand at the top and look out at where you’ve been and where you’re going, keep your wits about you.  Pull the latest version of the stipulation out of your back pocket–yeah, you too can reach it, pal — just do it! –then let your lawyer know how it looks. Call the accountant and ask that question that’s been sitting in your frontal lobe for nearly a month. Go ahead and pay your bills for this month, including the mortgage that just went up by$50 and is now seriously off the charts ridiculous, trusting that they will get paid again next month even if you don’t know how. Apply for the jobs that you can apply for; sure, they don’t excite you, but neither did that boulder that fell on your back last spring. When the money heebie jeebies come up at 3:33 am or while walking the dog this morning, do what your friend C. says, and just check in with your body, sit with the heebies and see all the ways in which they’re about so much more than money. In fact, they’re not really about the money at all (or so he says, and I believe him in my gut but head hasn’t quite figured it out yet). 

Speaking of which, calmly but repeatedly ask Alex for the money he owes you. He’s over there hanging off his own cliff and he can surely just toss you the wad of cash, which you can then catch in your teeth because you’ve gotten pretty dang amazing at such no-handed feats. While you’re at it, politely ask him – again – to stop taking food from your house; he can buy his own flour and cinammon and maple syrup…  Stay focused. Just a little bit farther to go. Think how good it will be to sit at the top and breathe and look around for a while. But don’t get too cocky. See that cliff over there? It’s next.

divorce by ennui

Can’t it just be over? Ah, people, I have a book to write. Kids to love and read to and ferry and feed. An elderly dog to tend to. Bills to pay. Friends to hang with. Bread to bake. Laps to swim. So much to do – so much I want to do – and I have to admit that looking at one more go-round of the stipulation just doesn’t grab my attention. Yes, I want it to be over. But do I have the time or energy to make it so? It appears not. I have been in Divorce Neglect Zone for about two weeks now. The ball is clearly in my court, and I’ve just been letting it sit there. Serena Williams I am not. One thing that didn’t help matters was getting an initial bill from my lawyer for word he’d done through the end of April. (April??) It was definitely more than I’d expected, and he was only getting started. Now, I don’t want to do anything out of fear that it will just cost me. It also increasingly ticks me off that my lawyer has done much much more than Alex’s lawyer toward finishing papers, investigating possibilities, etc, and I’m the one who is going to pay for that.

And yet this thing needs to get done. Reaching for some unseen energy in my gut to Just Do It. (Idea for a new Nike commercial:  throngs of middle aged women in the highest-priced, most techno tennies running kids thither and yon, walking dogs, picking up toys, racing to work, making dinner – and then walking into the lawyer’s office with the papers in hand — can’t you just see and hear it crescendoing with a sort of Rocky-like frenzy?)

Who’dathunkit

…but going to a movie with a man and both of your kids – plus an extra thrown in for good measure – is as sexy-happy as anything that can be done with a man on your own. Do you think the Brady’s were sexy-happy? Then again…they did have Alice. I’d be sexier and happier with an Alice.

or…

do you love the life you have?

live…

Live the life you imagine.

That is the sentiment I keep bumping into over and over. Here.  In San Francisco. In Los Angeles. In the things I read. In the conversations I have. In yoga class and with my Reiki teacher. In dreams and in moments of stillness.

And yet…what is that life? I’m not sure I can see it for all of the mess of this one. The boxes and the dust bunnies, the aging dog and the laundry. It’s really hard to see around the corner.